Thought I'd share this story, I stumbled on. I got teary-eyed in several places, especially the part with the dog.
Rare strokes of luck mark rescue
By JAMES VARNEY
Staff report
SLIDELL, La. -- As he pushed his skiff past the big boats aground on the interstate highway, Mike Parks feared the worst.
On the horizon, Parks could just make out the catamaran perched atop the twinspan bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. To his left, car antennas poked above the surface of the white caps splashing against a dealership's display windows, and to his right was the vast, watery plain of Oak Harbor and Eden Isles, the upscale neighborhood that at daybreak had contained more than 1,000 houses, a marina and a sprawling three-story apartment complex with scores of units.
The north shore of Lake Pontchartrain -- the one that existed before Hurricane Katrina -- was some three miles to the south. The home Parks and his wife, Melinda, had moved into less than a year ago was about two and three-quarter miles south. It was about 3 p.m. Monday, roughly four hours after Katrina's ferocious eye wall had shaved Slidell and roared off northeastward toward the Mississippi coast.
"Oh, man, oh, man, I just don't know, I had no idea it would be as bad as this," Parks said as he navigated what had once been a golf course fairway. In every direction, Parks saw houses without roofs, with boats smashed through garages and walls, with possessions mean and exquisite spilling into the dirty water that lapped into their foyers and bedrooms.
The tops of street signs provided some landmarks, but what was once an intricate web of streets and canals was now simply a marine wasteland.
"Even if insurance covers it, do we want to rebuild?" Melinda asked.
Parks, jumping out of the skiff now and then to push it across the shallow water over a driveway, shook his head.
"Let's see if there is anybody we can help first," he said.
And so, like a Titanic lifeboat crew, they puttered among the wreckage of Slidell, La., where authorities said Katrina had killed at least two people and left untold hundreds, perhaps thousands, of residents homeless.
In knots creeping along the water's edge, or in motorboats that crisscrossed the flooded landscape, people scavenged for scraps of their former lives. Communications were out everywhere -- even fire and rescue crews were having trouble staying in touch with each other. News from New Orleans or Mississippi was non-existent and the blackout over St. Tammany Parish meant that radio broadcasts carried no information about what was happening across the Northshore.
Throughout Oak Harbor and Eden Isles a creepy calm seemed to have settled over the flotsam of forever shattered lives. In canal network cul de sacs, swaths of boards and shingles and bobbing coolers and appliances formed what appeared to be a solid mass, as if one could walk across the wreckage to the flooded homes just beyond. Boats, some of them whacking big yachts, were aground at weird angles, the air filled with the high-pitched thwack and ping of lines whipping across their booms and masts. Cars had been tossed into homes. Insulation foam bubbled around the fringes of ragged, ripped edges of houses.
And then a screaming came across the water. To his right, Parks saw a woman gesticulating wildly from a second floor balcony at her home. Parks, a captain of sport fishing boats and offshore supply vessels who works out of Gulfport, Miss., navigated closer.
The woman, Ann Nash, told Parks her in-laws were trapped in their house nearby. She had spoken to them that morning, as they crawled into their attic to escape the rising storm surge. Parks agreed to check on them.
But the exact address proved difficult to find. So they pushed on further south toward their own house, figuring they could stop by Nash's in-laws on the return. By now, they were certain they would find little, if anything, worth salvaging.
And then, incredibly, when they motored into the canal behind Cutty Sark Cove, there was their home, largely intact, and sitting atop one of the few mounds of grass still visible. Inside, a slippery layer of mud coated the stone floors and had ruined the carpets, but the water had not reached that high and the meticulous cutout and crayoned tigers and balloon vendors on one wall -- the artwork of Aaron and Brady Parks, identical twins aged two and currently residing with grandparents in Baton Rouge -- was intact.
Melinda Parks opened and closed her mouth like a fish out of water.
"I do not believe it," she said, shaking her head. "I am pleasantly surprised beyond belief."
The Parkses quickly surveyed their astonishing good fortune, stuffed Hershey bars and crackers into a Ziploc baggie, and returned to their skiff. This time, rather than leave the search for the Nashes to chance, he picked up Ann Nash at her home and set off once again.
With Ann Nash guiding, Parks returned to a pocket of a canal he'd searched before, but this time the cries from the boat were returned from shore. Jim Nash, 77, and his wife, Odette, 65, had heard the yells before but could not get out of their attic in time to respond.
Parks cut the motor and the skiff drifted on to the back porch, and the grateful, stunned Nash family was reunited. They were surprisingly upbeat given what they'd endured.
"We really thought we could make it, we were told the water had never gotten much higher than the docks even in big storms," Odette Nash said.
Indeed, she had just hung up a cell phone conversation with an evacuated neighbor around 8 a.m. when she looked out her back window and saw the water coming over the edge and charging her house like a train in a tunnel.
"We just scrambled to the attic and prayed and we've been up there ever since," Odette said.
As the now-crowded skiff returned to Ann Nash's house, Parks encountered two St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's deputies in another boat.
"Are you OK?" one deputy shouted across the canal. "What are you doing out here?"
"We're fine," Parks sang back. "We're rescuing people."
"That's just fine. Thank you," the deputy replied. "We're the first boat that could get out here."
"Second boat," Melinda Parks said softly, a smile creasing her face.
The Nashes deposited on higher ground, Parks turned his skiff toward the Oak Harbor marina and, across the horizon, the oddly lumpy line of the twin span bridges that carry Interstate 10 across Lake Pontchartrain. Even from a distance it was clear the marooned catamaran was the least of the bridges' concerns. Katrina had left both the eastbound and westbound elevated stretches structurally unsound.
The same was true of the marina, where boats had been tossed about recklessly. One giant vessel had pierced a three-story apartment building, parked there half inside and half outside the wrecked building. Now, hours into his odyssey, Parks faced less light and more wind, and he needed to return to the Interstate where he could pull his skiff ashore before dark.
And then another voice wafted across the increasingly unruly water.
On a strip of land still left along what had been the lake's north shore, standing among the demolished camps and houses and restaurants that had once faced the water, a man was waving his arms above his head.
Parks crossed over, his skiff slapping on the waves, and found Jim Elorriaga, a New Orleans blues musician who goes by the simpler name of E.L.
"Do you want a lift?" Melinda Parks yelled. "Oh, God, do I," E.L. said.
As the skiff pulled up in some reeds, E.L. began to relate his tale.
Trapped in his apartment along the lake's edge, he had gone first to the second floor and then the roof as Katrina built in fury and the water rose.
Finally, with the water closing over the top of his roof, Elorriaga saw the Sundance sailboat adrift and passing nearby. He said he jumped to a floating refrigerator and from there to the boat, which began to lurch about crazily in the tempest.
Eventually, the Sundance rammed an even bigger boat, and the two of them ran aground in a T. With his belongings and home gone, Elorriaga sat down to wait for help.
"I even lost my dog, Woody," he said in despair.
But, as it happened, the Parkses had seen Woody earlier. He was nearby, jumping among the wreckage floating around a gas storage tank. Elorriaga splashed off and soon was carrying Woody in his arms.
It was nearing 7 p.m. when Parks finally turned north and headed back to the Interstate. By the time he returned, the water had receded enough so that Slidell Fire Department units had been able to set up a command post near where the Interstate meets Lake Pontchartrain.
Firefighters scrambled into the shallows and helped pull up Parks’ boat, and then got a heavy jacket around Elorriaga. The rescue crews were still desperate for information, asking about survivors and the extent of the destruction in Eden Isles and possessing little news about New Orleans or Mississippi.
"It's like St. Tammany is a black hole," one firefighter muttered. "They don't know anything at all has happened here."
James Varney is a staff writer for The Times-Picayune. He can be contacted at [email protected].
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